


To be able to forget means sanity

by middlemarch



Category: Northern Exposure
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Dreams, F/M, Judaism, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 03:24:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15015596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: After the first year, he stopped keeping track.





	To be able to forget means sanity

Joel dreamed of Maggie most nights, even if he didn’t remember it. He woke with the emotion that her dark eyes evoked, an appetite that had no anxiety in it, a sense of his body as being a whole entire creature with its own wants. There was a sweetness left with him that evaporated when the shower’s spray hit him, but not completely. It made him uneasy around her and snappish, the silence in the night another strain no one seemed to understand. She should be able to, not born in Cicely, but she never admitted it. In the City, someone would understand, would shrug and say _You should be so lucky_ but no one did in Alaska, at least not in Cicely. Marilyn only stared at him, speaking just enough to rule out mutism.

In the night, Maggie was herself and another woman. One who bantered with him and then surprised him with a soft, lingering kiss, one on his mouth and one at the base of his throat. She called him Joel, not Fleischman, and he loved it. She let him hold her and she let him guide her hand, lighting the candles on Shabbat, reciting the prayer together than was hers alone to say. The wine was not as good as the bottle Soapy’d left them, too close to syrup, but they drank it and it tasted fine on her lips. He woke up and the window was filled with pine trees, all that blue sky without one single fume, the lake like a mirror, like a gate to a world he’d never leave.

He worried sometimes he was losing his mind—that they’d finally send him home when it was too late for him to care. Maggie would be the pilot and he wouldn’t even try to hold her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Watching Northern Exposure again after a long time, struck by the ways Maggie/Joel works and the way the writers sort of goofed with it.
> 
> Title is from Jack London.


End file.
